On March 11, the microblogging platform Twitter opened its political ads policy and Ads Transparency Centre (ATC) for India. This center allows anyone across the world to view details about Twitter ads by political parties, with further information like ad spend, reach, payment information and targeted demographics.
“This is part of our overall goal to protect the health of the public conversation on our service and to provide meaningful context around all political entities who use our advertising products,” said Twitter in a statement.
With the new rules of advertising only certified advertisers will be allowed to run political campaigning ads on Twitter. To be a registered political advertiser, the account holder will now have to apply for certification and go through a vetting process.
Post certification, all ads promoted from the certified ad account will appear in Twitter’s Ads Transparency Center and include spend, reach, targeting, and payment information (specifically, the city and state of the billing address, and either the name on the credit card or the entity name for IO). In addition to the certification, all political advertisers will have to comply with general Twitter Ads policies, which mandates the profiles to have a profile photo, header photo, and website must be consistent with the handle’s online presence.
In May 2018, Twitter has launched similar Political Campaigning Policy and Ads Transparency Centre in the United States. Now on Feb 19th, the policy was expanded to include all European Union member states, India and Australia.
